A blog about tabletop hobby and or strategy games, with a side order of electronic turn based goodness here and there. Now with tons of retro gaming content both electronic and tabletop. Also with 20% more self loathing douchebaggery!

Monday, September 14, 2009

Operation Game Collection 3

Its that time again, and long overdue! But while doing my usual morning procrastination at exercising I was inspired by some of the RPG books sitting underneath my coffee table. See I do my situps right by there and was avoiding doing them for a few minutes so I looked through some books.

And here we are!

Today's RPG selection is:

GURPS

Game Summary: GURPS. Gurps is short for: Generic Universal Roleplaying System. Its Steve Jackson Games' house RPG system. Most notable for over its various editions having like almost any possible setting book made for it. Its flexible, but there are so many options and available rules as to make it overwhelming, especially if you want to do anything really advanced. Which much of its fanbase does. Its the RPG for supernerds.

1: Amount I play it.Low. I have played in an ultrashort Car Wars campaign where it was used for character generation and thankfully not the car combat, and an Aliens play by post at RPGnet where the mechanics never really actually seemed to be used beyond initial character generation. (Which is probably why its the only good play by post game I have ever experienced. Till the GM dropped out and didn't bother to much tell anyone outside of whining in the General Chat area about his issues with his bisexuality and such... Great game killed a bit too soon due to emo GM.)

2: Desire to play it. Low. The mechanics did not thrill me, and I can honestly use other better systems and just take the fluff sections and transplant it into an RPG system I do like. Plus as I mentioned in the summary, its too damned detailed. Some of the bolt on systems for mecha and vehicular bits take it into the absurd level. Great setting info in the books though, and thankfully the core mechanics of Gurps are simple enough its easy to extrapolate them into other better universal games. Like Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system.

3: Popularity in my area.Low. A few people speak fondly of it, but not many. However some people have actually run or claimed to run games.

4: Amount I own.Medium overall, though I paid Low, or close to it. For a game a player insisted he was going to run and then never did bolting on us while continually proclaiming he was preparing for the game I bought the GM screen which has a hardcopy edition of the core basic ruleset, and the CDROM character generator. From various clearances I have a number of the sourcebooks which are quite interesting. For other games' fluff I bought the Autoduel, Ogre, and Starfleet Universe books.

5: Stuff I may still want to buy.Medium, but I will only pay low. Much of what I want is in the 3rd edition ruleset which went for a long time when they printed dozens of interesting sourcebooks. But its for the fluff and setting information to use with other games. But the usual generic toolset manner in the books makes them a good source. Gurps is almost the RPG Wikipedia in a way. Their books cover a ton of topics in a nice general format with multiple options and styles to play, with references to take the topic further.

6: In Print? Yes, in its 4th edition. The majority of my working gameable books are in 4th, though the masses of sourcebooks I got cheap are all 3rd. Its mostly all compatible, but as I mentioned, its all for the fluff for other game systems.

2: Desire to play it. Medium. Aliens is my favorite movie and I would love to make up some decks or just use the preconstructed starter decks and get some games going.

3: Popularity in my area.N/A. Never heard of anyone playing it, ever.

4: Amount I own.Low. Got the starter decks dirt cheap, a couple boosters at the time of its release at MSRP, and some of the Terminator boosters at a massive discount.

5: Stuff I may still want to buy.Low. I'd love to get a couple boxes of the AvP boosters to make up some nice decks, but finding them on ebay at all much less cheap is a crapshoot.

6: In Print? Nope. Long dead.

And finally, this installment's miniatures selection is:

AT-43

Game Summary: A 28mm scale scifi miniatures game with prepainted figures. Great backstory (basically its the Korean War in space with posthuman nanotech robots, big klunky Soviet robots, and sentient gorilla men.), awesome models, fun game! Its like Warhammer 40k with most of the suck taken out.

1: Amount I play it.Currently low, but was medium.

2: Desire to play it. High. I like the game system, I like the models, I like the universe. I have players. Its a matter of finding the time. And collecting more players and new ones. Of course like all my other ideas to collect people, nobody backs me up on it for various reasons.

3: Popularity in my area.Low. A few people have armies and claim to play. But getting them together and actually getting some games in? OH DEAR.

4: Amount I own.High, but spent medium. I have 2 massive armies and one smaller one for the game. Yay distributor changes and massive sales because of it.

5: Stuff I may still want to buy.Medium to High. If I had more active players of it and got more games in I would probably have at least one more army, and my existing forces would be much larger.